Taste and Fashion - From the French Revolution to the Present Day

By James Laver

This classic book contains a wealth of information on the taste and fashion trends of England from the French Revolution to the 1940s, and will prove a very interesting read for anyone with an interest in the subject. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Jan 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781447484653

Book preview

LACHASSE

Chapter I

BACK TO NATURE AND THE GREEKS

THERE is something arbitrary, no doubt, in choosing 1789 as the starting-point for a book on modern costume. There is an element of artificiality in all such limits to periods; for there is no magic in a century as such, and all ages are ages of transition. Historical periods neither begin nor end abruptly. The influences which were to shape the French Revolution had been at work for the greater part of the reign of Louis XVI; simplification had already set in. On the other hand, the main features of eighteenth-century dress still persisted—at least, until the fall of Robespierre.

Yet if we bear these facts in mind there is little harm and much convenience in being able to commence our survey at a definite point. The rise of the river may be difficult to detect, but there is an instant when it overflows its banks; the tide ebbs almost imperceptibly, but there is a moment when the boat grounds upon the shingle and remains embedded. There is much to be said for the view that the eighteenth century ended not in 1800, but in 1789.

In retrospect there seems to be a curious unity in eighteenth-century costume. Theatrical costumiers, at all events, have rarely bothered to distinguish the changes of style which took place between Queen Anne and George III. In actual fact there were very considerable modifications; but it is permissible to hold that the general outline of both male and female costume remained very much the same throughout this period. We all know what this general outline was: for men knee-breeches, stockings, buckled shoes, a waistcoat—very long at the beginning of the century, and growing steadily shorter—a full coat, reaching down to the knees and flaring out at the bottom into a somewhat wide arc; a white, soft linen shirt adorned with lace at cuffs and neck; and, most characteristic of all, a three-cornered hat perched on the top of a wig which, of abnormal size in 1700, grew gradually smaller as the century proceeded. This typical eighteenth-century male costume was largely a French creation, but it was worn almost universally throughout Europe. It was the mark of civilized life.

Female costume shows considerably greater variation, but the main features are very much the same throughout the period. Even when it is not supported by panniers the skirt is full, and it is nearly always opened down the front to show an elaborately embroidered underskirt. The bodice is stiff, the corset being in general built into the dress and laced quite openly down the front. The neck is square-cut and low, the exposed part of the bosom and the throat being protected, if need be, by a fichu; the sleeves come just below the elbow. The hair is sometimes dressed close to the head, as in 1750, or is built up on towering structures of wire and padding, as in the seventeen-seventies. It is often powdered, and, in spite of the variations of the headdress, it has the same artificiality as men’s wigs during the same period.

Nothing can excuse the jumble of styles too often seen in revivals of the eighteenth-century plays: yet there is none the less a recognizable eighteenth-century costume, both for men and women, and there seemed little reason up to about 1780 why clothes should ever vary beyond very narrowly prescribed limits. It was the recognized costume of the French aristocracy, essentially urban, sophisticated, and artificial, imposing its taste upon the whole of the civilized world; it was the costume of the salon, the uniform of a Court; at its most characteristic it was elaborately embroidered and decorated: it was the dress of idleness and pleasure. Even those who could afford neither, who left out the embroidery and had their clothes made of more solid material, yet modified in very few particulars the general outline of eighteenth-century dress.

We have said that eighteenth-century dress was essentially urban in character, and up to the middle of the century at least an urban life seemed the only one worthy of a civilized person. That age-long process which in almost every European language has turned the words which signify a countryman into terms of abuse was reaching its culmination: reaction was due. It is hardly necessary to describe such a reaction: it is sufficient to mention the name of Rousseau.

Rousseauism, the belief that civilization was essentially corrupt and that true virtue could only be found in rural life, quickly made its way into the most blasé circles of the French aristocrac. It led to a new, if still purely theoretical, admiration for the peasants. It gave rise to a new sentimentality. It induced even Marie-Antoinette to play at being a milkmaid, and was one of the main underlying currents of the French Revolutionary movement. But in England the same sentiment, or a healthier variety of it, had long been manifest. There had been no Richelieu to centralize English life, no Louis XIV to make even nobles feel that unless they were also courtiers they were of small account. In England, not the courtier, but the country gentleman was still the dominant type, and the English country gentry had already introduced certain modifications into the accepted form of eighteenth-century costume.

To the French philosophes, who prepared the way for the Revolution, there was much to admire in English life: its liberty, its comparative lack of privilege, and, above all, its simplicity. And so it came about that when Frenchmen wished to discard the livery of the salon they tended to adopt quite naturally the costume of the English country gentleman. The Englishman’s coat was plain, so theirs became plain also. The Englishman, with his passion for riding, had found the full skirt of the eighteenth-century coat incommodious. He had cut away the front, and the square slice which he took out of his coat has had the curious fortune of being perpetuated to this day in men’s evening dress. For riding the three-cornered hat was not very convenient: its wide brim caught the wind, and the shallowness of its crown made it useless as a shock helmet in case of a fall. The English country gentleman therefore decreased the size of the brim until it disappeared almost altogether, and he raised the height of the crown. Little more was needed to transform the tricorne of the eighteenth century into the top-hat of the nineteenth. The abandonment of breeches and the adoption of trousers lay still some years in the future, and the change had obviously no connexion with the riding costume of the English country gentleman.

A recent writer¹ gives some curious details of the extent of French Anglomania under the Directoire and the Consulate. It had existed, he states, ever since Horace Walpole’s visit to Mme du Deffand, but its expansion was due, after the fall of Robespierre, partly to the impulse towards country life we have been discussing, and partly, as M. Sinmare says with justice, to the fact that many French modistes must have fled to England during the Revolution and, returning thence, brought with them a picture of English fashion. More important still, they brought an enthusiasm for the excellent English cloth and for well-made boots.

It became for a time the fashion in Paris to drink punch, or even tea at five o’clock, or to lead on a string the traditional English bulldog. The famous Mlle Bertin made her establishment a centre for the imitation of English modes, especially English shawls and spencers, the shape of the latter coat being due, it is said, to the fact that the eccentric Lord Spencer had once burned his coat-tails while standing in front of the fire, had had them trimmed neatly by his tailor, and had gone out into the street in this fashion. It is interesting to note that the imitation of things English went so far as to lead to the dropping of the rolled ‘r’ in conversation, almost to its omission altogether, as in many English words. English carriages and vehicles of all kinds had been much admired by the émigrés, and their return introduced the mode into Paris. Real elegants abandoned the French cabriolet for the tilbury, the sulky, the buggy, or the whisky. English horses were imported, both as carriage horses and for riding, and for a while the rigid English manner of sitting in the saddle was preferred to the more easy French seat. M. Sinmare even attributes the multiplication of restaurants, which had been unknown in Paris before the Revolution, to an imitation of the English mode of eating in taverns. It really seems as if in the eyes of the men of the Directoire period the English could do no wrong. But this changed for a time at the advent of Napoleon.

Admiration for the English, however, was but a small part of the impulse which was to change French costume so radically in the closing years of the eighteenth century. Anglomanie was overshadowed by anticomanie. Admirable as country life might be, the life of the men of the Revolution lay in the town, or rather in the city, considered as a political entity. They were, indeed, obsessed with the idea of the city: they called one another ‘citizens,’ and they looked back for their models to the city states of ancient Greece, and to that city which was so much more than a city state, and yet in its essence was never anything else—ancient Rome. The Greek democracies and republican Rome seemed to the men of the Revolution the ideal model on which to base their new policy. It was not surprising, therefore, that a quite uncritical admiration for Greeks and Romans should give rise to an attempt to imitate them in all things, even in dress.

MME TALLIEN IN GRECIAN ROBES

Jacques-Louis David

By courtesy of Frank T. Sabin, Bond Street, London

THE GRACES IN A HIGH WIND

Etching by J. Gillray, 1810

A WINDY CORNER (DETAIL)

Lithograph after W. H. W., 1864

The attempt to do so for men ended in failure. Neither the Greek tunic nor the Roman toga was at all suitable for life in eighteenth-century Paris, and it is one of the paradoxes of the Revolutionary scene that the would-be Greeks and Romans attired themselves, as we have already noted, not as Roman senators or as Greek philosophers, but as English country gentlemen.

With women’s dress, however, it is a very different story. It is one of the fundamental principles of fashion that women’s dress is much more susceptible to dominant tastes and ideas than the dress of men. The dress of women is modified much more easily: it shows much less tendency to stereotype itself into a uniform—a tendency which is the most striking characteristic of male dress throughout the ages. Also, women are willing to put up with much more inconvenience in order to be in the fashion, and they do not in general lead such strenuous lives, so that the question of mere suitability is less insistent. We might expect to find, therefore, that the neo-classical enthusiasm of the Revolutionary period should find an echo in female dress, and that this is true is obvious enough from any study of the costume of the period.

The effects we have noted, however, were not immediately apparent. Throughout the period of the Revolution up to the death of Robespierre feminine dress followed the lines of the years immediately before the Revolution. There was, indeed, more simplicity, not only on account of economic conditions, but because it was positively dangerous to be seen in the street in fine clothes; the essential lines were the same, however, as those which had ruled immediately before 1789. But the problem is more profound than this: while what might be called the ‘current idea’ determines the form which fashion shall take, the actual impulse to change lies elsewhere. It lies, as we have tried to demonstrate in a later chapter of this book, in the desire to please, or, to put it more brutally, the impulse is based on seduction. This impulse, while never extinguished, is dormant in times of great political crisis, and only emerges into full view when the crisis is over and people feel once more free to enjoy themselves. Therefore the revival of Greek fashions, or versions of what were supposed to be Greek fashions, was fully manifest only with the end of the Terror and the establishment of the Directoire.

It was yet another paradox in this most paradoxical of human problems that people only began to adopt the costume of the ancient world when the ideals of Republican virtue had been abandoned for the frank pursuit of pleasure. The frivolity which the Republicans thought they had extinguished for ever with the blood of aristocrats burst forth with renewed intensity once the threat of the guillotine was removed.

The Directoire is a most interesting and instructive period, especially to those, like ourselves, who have recently passed through somewhat similar crises. Like causes produce like effects, and the nineteen-twenties have many points of resemblance with the years between 1795 and 1800. In both periods women found themselves suddenly emancipated, and their first action was to cut their hair short and to take off most of their clothes. Both ages saw the rise of dance mania.

Dance mania seems to be a universal result of great catastrophes. There was an astonishing outbreak after the devastation of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, when whole villages went dancing mad. There was another example in Germany in the sixteenth century. The dance mania which followed the conclusion of the war of 1914–18 is sufficiently recent to be remembered by almost everybody. The whole phenomenon awaits a really scientific analysis, to which the anthropologist as well as the historian might make a valuable contribution. It is sufficient to note here that dance mania was never more widespread (except perhaps in 1920) than it was in the years following the end of the Terror.

Here we must distinguish. The prevalence of private balls does not constitute dance mania. The essence of dance mania is that the dancing shall be public, that anyone shall be admitted who has the power to pay. It is therefore particularly noticeable in a period when social upheaval has thrown open the doors of pleasure to the new class of nouveaux riches. The bals publics of the Directoire were innumerable, and they had a profound influence on costume, not only by the thirst for pleasure which they represented, but by providing a platform, a shop-window, as it were, for the launching of new fashions. A fine dress was no longer something to be worn at Court or at select private assemblies: it was something to be worn in the most public manner possible. All the checks which Court etiquette or mere good taste imposed were suddenly removed, and therefore the natural tendency of fashion to push itself to extremes was intensified, and the seduction impulse which lies at the back of all change in women’s dress was displayed in all its nakedness.

The enthusiasm for things theatrical was used as an excuse to expose more of the female form to the public gaze than has ever happened since, even in the modern period. Single garments of diaphanous materials replaced the elaborate panniers and stomachers of a former age. Dresses were split up the sides, to the knee and beyond, and revealed limbs clothed in flesh-coloured tights, or sometimes not clothed at all. Dresses were cut very low at the neck, and although a few daring spirits, who went so far as to expose the breasts, were hissed in the street, the costume of the majority of women was not very much more prudish. What the somewhat puritanical Sébastien Mercier in his Nouveau Tableau de Paris calls "les réservoirs de la maternité" were the undoubted focal points of interest during the whole of the period, just as legs were during the nineteen-twenties.

Legs were not entirely invisible under the Directoire. As we have seen, they could sometimes be glimpsed through the slits in the side of the robe or through the transparency of the actual material; but it was also the fashion to walk in the street with one side of the dress gathered in the hand. On the feet were flat-heeled slippers, sometimes cross-gartered up the leg. The hair was short and dressed à la Titus or à la victime. The very name of the last is a sufficient indication of the frivolity of the period. There was even a Bal des Victimes in the Hotel Richelieu, where it was fashionable to wear the hair cut short at the nape of the neck in imitation of the preparations for the guillotine. At the Bal it was customary to salute one’s friends with a sharp movement of the head, as of one laying it upon the block, and some of the women went so far as to have a thin red ribbon tied round their necks to imitate the cut of the knife.

Since the Assembly had voted the restitution of goods confiscated during the Revolution some young aristocrats found themselves very much better off than they would have been if their fathers had lived, and they formed the nucleus of a wild and extravagant society, animated by a sensuality as imperious as that of the ancien régime and much less refined. Politeness fell out of use, as it always does in times of feminine emancipation. The old aristocratic prejudices were discarded, especially the one against making money by trade—or rather by finance, for speculation was universal. The Palais-Royal was a bourse by day and a place of rendezvous by night. Under its arcades cafés alternated with gambling hells and brothels. If the whole of Paris seemed given over to the more violent forms of pleasure, Barras was scarcely the man to offer either a better example or a restraining hand. That was to be the work of the little man on whom Barras had contemptuously palmed off his discarded mistress.

Through this feverish Paris crowded and jostled a vast assemblage of men and women who seemed to have decided to pass the greater part of their lives in the open streets. The women dressed as we have been describing; the men in the Incroyable costume—the last costume of fantasy to be worn by the male sex before it settled down for a century into its modified version of English country clothes.

The Incroyable wore the same kind of clothes as his neighbours, but with the difference of lighter materials and more violent colours, stripes everywhere, extending even to the stockings, the tails of the riding-coat incredibly elongated so that they almost touched the ground, the waistcoat so diminished that it scarcely covered the chest, the neck-cloth so exaggerated that it concealed the chin and made all men look as if they were suffering from goitre, the hair unpowdered and wildly dishevelled, the hat neither the tricorne of the previous age nor the top-hat of the future, but a kind of crescent moon, of huge dimensions—such a headgear as might be made by folding a wide-brimmed hat in two and crushing it under the wheels of a passing car. Hats of this kind, much reduced in size, persisted as a part of evening dress well into the following century. They were worn by some of Napoleon’s generals. They are not altogether unrelated to the cocked hat of modern diplomatic usage, but their glory in the street was shortlived. They passed with the Incroyables.

Women’s dress showed little modification in essential lines till almost the end of the Empire, but certain changes may be noted. Dresses were universally white, because the dresses of the ancient Greeks and Romans had been white. The success of Gérard’s Psyché made faces white also. Women gave up rouge and began to cultivate an interesting pallor. At first women wore very little jewellery of any kind, but the successes of Napoleon in Italy introduced a fashion for antique cameos. This, however, was after all part of the general neo-classical enthusiasm. His expedition to Egypt introduced a new note, which was ultimately to sweep away the old classicism altogether.

Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, although it failed in its object and nearly ended in disaster, made a profound impression upon the French mind. It brought the discovery of a new exoticism, a country of the imagination yet unexplored, and hieroglyphics and Sphinx’s heads soon mingled with the old classical motifs in interior decoration and in jewellery. Antique cameos were succeeded by scarabs and reproductions of the Egyptian funerary figures; but the scholarship necessary for the understanding of ancient Egyptian art was lacking, and so the Egyptian mania tended to merge into a revived Orientalism, an enthusiasm for the things of the Near East. Turbans began to make their appearance as female headdresses, and lasted, as was natural enough, well into the Romantic period.

The Oriental enthusiasm also brought in a vogue for shawls. Napoleon’s ships had brought back with them from Egypt a quantity of new materials, and Josephine was one of the first to use them. Indian shawls, especially cashmeres, soon became the rage, to such an extent, indeed, that a whole manufacture of imitations of such articles sprang up in the neighbourhood of Paris, and these manufactures were still further stimulated by the war with England, which cut off supplies from the East. The shawl became an indispensable article of toilet for every fashionable woman, and must have proved extremely welcome as an addition to a dress which provided such inadequate protection both against rain and cold.

Shawls were of every kind of material—of cloth, of serge, of knitted silk, and even of rabbit’s fur—and of all colours—red, blue, Egyptian earth colours—or embroidered with flowers and leaves. They were worn with their ends floating in the wind or crossed over the breast. They were, however, not the only means of protection against the inclemencies of a northern climate: jackets of various kinds became the mode, especially the so-called spencers or tailless coats, which were generally of dark cloth, with very small revers and a round collar. The military triumphs of the Empire brought in all kinds of garments adapted from soldiers’ uniforms, and an interesting special study could be made of the transplanting of hussars’ froggings, lanyards, epaulettes, etc., to feminine costume. Military fashions also had a considerable influence on headgear, with adaptations of the Polish cap and the like. Napoleon’s marshals were permitted to design their own uniforms, and it would have been strange if women, who enjoyed an even larger licence, should not have produced some striking fantasies of their own.

Even Englishwomen were influenced during the long war with Napoleon to experiment with pseudo-military fashion. The Oriental impulse was even more strongly felt, not only in clothes but in furniture, and, with a suitable time lag, in architecture also. France produced no such striking tribute to the Oriental fashion as the Pavilion at Brighton.

Englishwomen had never adopted the extremely daring fashions of the Directoire period: they were, none the less, profoundly influenced by what was taking place on the other side of the Channel, the more so as it was now much easier than it had been to get reliable information in a reasonable space of time. During the second half of the eighteenth century fashion news was supplied to outlying places like England through the medium of little dolls, dressed in the latest Parisian modes and exported for purposes of copying. A great number of the dolls which have come down to us from the eighteenth century were not children’s toys at all, but sample toilettes; but this was at best a somewhat clumsy method of procedure. The invention of the fashion plate made everything much easier, and when we consider that during the troubles of the Revolution many French dressmakers and milliners took refuge in London it is not surprising that the empire of French fashion was more firmly established than ever. With the exception of one gap of twelve years it may be said that from the end of the eighteenth century French female fashion governed the world, including England.

This gap, from the Peace of Amiens in 1802 to 1814, is a very curious one, and led to a strange divergence of French and English fashion. It is only necessary to examine the fashion plates of both countries—for England too was producing fashion plates at the beginning of the nineteenth century—to realize this divergence very completely. It is a curious fact that by 1812 the English had abandoned the high waist and had begun to wear corsets again, the true corset only being possible when the waist is normal. The results were not very happy, and when Englishwomen flocked over to Paris after the first abdication of Napoleon they found themselves figures of ridicule. Both corsets and normal